Taxpayers burned by carbon trust

It is more that just another hated tax; the provincial carbon tax and Pacific Carbon Trust are glaring symbols of a failed political system that is monstrously imbalanced and out of touch with taxpayers.

The tax accomplishes nothing, according to our auditor general, has been rejected by all other jurisdictions in North America as an unworkable concept, yet we see no move to address this from either main party. The party in power says it will freeze the current level of the tax but keep it in place, and the opposition party actually plans to expand it and put all the incoming funds under the B.C. Climate Action Secretariat, which is under the discretionary control of the premier’s office.

We are in financial distress as a province, taxed to the limit, yet here we are tilting at windmills with this expensive game. We are a symbolic innovator, says one party in justification; the other at one time opposed it, but when it didn’t get them elected, they did a 180 and said they really loved it all the time. Whatever your degree of environmentalist commitment, the whole thing analytically nets out as just plumb dumb.

And the hard truth is both main parties mislead, lie or game the subject, and it ends up just being about insatiable taxation and wasteful spending. We taxpayers had no democratic representation whatsoever throughout this dance macabre.

So, if it is such a wasteful disaster as our auditor general says and the public generally hates it and can ill afford it, where are the voices of reason and corrective change? Sorry, the system says, not allowed by party discipline; we want the money more than we want to do right by the taxpayers.

This is a sequel to the HST failure of governance and it is the epitome of a general failure of the system. To all you politicians who advocate nefariously, and to all you politicians who say nothing when you should speak out, you are flirting with sinking this obnoxious ship you sail on. Beware of your taunting and trivializing the electorate, because it is driving us toward a critical mass of dissatisfaction. You have gone too far.

This may just be the beginning of an end you all created by the lack of free voices and lack of representative government, and you wouldn’t be the first in political history to have caused your own extinction.